Take a virtual tour of New York on Google Maps and some blurry images appear.
As you zoom down in satellite view, what looks like the crisp outline of the airport terminal near upstate Buffalo dissolves into a fuzzy white blob. Instead of cars, blotches of color sit in the main parking lot.
Swing southeast 140 miles to the prison in Elmira, near the Pennsylvania border, or the atomic research lab in Schenectady, about 180 miles to the northeast — and the images hide behind the same type of blur.
The alterations are the product of New York state’s homeland security apparatus, done in the hope of preventing terrorists from attacking.
As a staggered nation scrambled after the 2001 terrorist attacks to anticipate possible targets, there was a widespread sanitizing of publicly available information suddenly viewed as tip sheets and road maps for terrorists.
But what also resulted, as shown by an Associated Press review, were some befuddling inconsistencies — telling private pilots not to fly over nuclear reactors, for example, and then not letting them know where the plants were located.
It was all based on a fear that seemingly innocuous fragments of information could be paired to hatch an attack. Security-sensitive information wasn’t just the coordinates of the nation’s nuclear power plants or the locations of massive inventories of dangerous chemicals or detailed maps of potentially explosive natural gas pipelines. Withheld from public view were things that citizens might need to know: emergency response plans for public buildings, building blueprints and drinking water test results.
The efforts sometimes have tried to defy the Internet-age reality that once something is public, it’s nearly impossible to make it private again.
Critics who believe government swung too far toward secrecy do not believe all information should be available. Rather, they argue that in too many cases decisions were made to hide information that was, in fact, important for the public to know.
“We do not have a king or a ruling class that decides what our security policies should be,” said Steven Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. “Secrecy short-circuits the whole democratic deliberative system, and it’s fundamentally at odds with the kind of society we are all committed to.”
Others argue that the government has performed with admirable openness during the war on terror, especially compared with other wars, when outright censorship was routine.
